by liberal japonicus
I may be overthinking this, but these are the dots I am connecting.
In the news is the story of Yuja Wang, a Chinese concert pianist, pushing back against Norman Lebrecht, a BBC Radio 3 classical music presenter. From the Guardian
Pianist Yuja Wang today made public an email sent to her by writer, critic and Radio 3 presenter Norman LeBrecht, and her response that accuses the journalist of “derogatory misogynistic bullying”.
Lebrecht had written to the musician querying her decision to withdraw from a BBC Lebrecht Interview stating: “I am surprised and disappointed. I thought you were a serious person who stood by her commitments. I may have to revise that opinion.”
The piece quotes Lebrecht
Yuja Wang had agreed with me a year ago to do a Lebrecht Interview for Radio 3. She kept putting it off until I lost patience and sent her an email that was perhaps a tad sharp. There was nothing bullying in telling her that I thought less of her than before, nor was it misogynistic: I would say the same to a male artist. She published the email, the BBC took a view and pulled my next series. I apologised to Sam Jackson and the BBC for any unintended embarrassment,” said Lebrecht.
Wang is a phenomenal pianist, full stop. She has technique and speed and she is drawn to pieces that display this. After I posted earlier about Prokofiev, I had her performing Prokofiev’s 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos on my repeat list as well as her Ravel. She also does Art Tatum’s Tea for Two as an encore piece as well as some other jaw dropping stuff. This Rick Beato video has her playing Flight of the Bumblebee and Beato points out that her hands move so fast, they are just a blur.
But (and you all knew, this couldn’t just be about music), she also distinguishes herself from other female pianists in her fashion choices when she performs. Looking at the youtube videos I listed above or a dive into Youtube can show this, but this Dave Hurwitz podcast discusses having to delete comments from his video about her Rachmaninoff cycle and you can get an idea of content by the title Music Chat: Yuja Wang’s Dresses (And The Pigs Who Talk About Them) Hurwitz wasn’t too high on the recording in the first video, which I assumed let some commenters think that it was open season on Wang. This post points out that Wang’s fashion choice might reflect Wang’s approach to music.
Is it not possible that Yuja Wang’s musical brilliance and “irreverent” clothes and interviews are not at odds, but in harmony with each other? I think they are. Yuja Wang is being informative, not “irreverent” or performative in the pejorative sense, when she shares that she thinks of Prokofiev as a “naughty boy” and Mozart as a “party animal.” It’s well understood (at least, it was when I was studying at University) that they absolutely were, and she’s channeling the sh*t out of that. That you’re so blinded by her age and gender that you cannot make these connections, to my mind, disqualifies you from being able to critique it.
I think it is also important that she came to the US when she was 14 to study at the Curtis Institute, renting an apartment and living on her own. I imagine that a lot of her fashion choices came about from when she was there, which was around 2002, an era of bare midriffs and micro minis. I tend to think that we are all wanting to be what we thought was cool when we were just turning into teenagers. God help us.
None of this will be a surprise to commenters here, but I want to make a few more observations that I think link this to other things.
Wang’s first impulse was to simply avoid Lebrecht and it was only when Lebrecht wrote to her did she say anything. I don’t know the ins and outs of UK defamation law, but I hope that Lebrecht doesn’t decide to sooth his bruised ego by suing Wang, but I think if you go through Lebrecht’s previous writing, one might think that Wang let him off easy by simply avoiding the interview, but this was just too much of an insult to Norm and he had to make a snarky remark in his reply, a remark that cost him his job at BBC.
I see (and again, I may be overthinking this) a connection between this spat and Epstein. One thing we can see is an absence of Asian and Black names in the Epstein files. This NYTimes article points to one person, Joi Ito, who fell afoul of Epstein connections, but I’d argue that Joi Ito’s background is very unJapanese, and what that leads me to suggest is that while Epstein’s connections may have been influenced by Epstein’s preferences in girls/women, another component is that minorities might be better at recognizing the transactionality involved and avoided it. This recognition comes from being on the wrong side of the power dynamic.
I see a number of people writing about how Lebrecht’s behavior is misyogyny and kind of stop there. I think that gives a mistaken impression. Yes, misyogyny is there, but it is baked into the power relationships. There is more than a fair share of hatred of the young (telling that there is no single word that describes this, ageism is discrimination against older people) in Lebrecht’s actions, but I’m not precisely sure where you draw the line at someone being misyogynistic and someone thinking that these young-uns need to respect me.
Anyway, thoughts about this?
Perhaps this post by Lebrecht has something to do with it.
She doesn’t need him. He needs her. He’s a gossip and a hanger on, much like Jann Wenner.
I propose the portmanteau “gatecreeper” for this particular combination of self-importance and sexism. I do think he’s being sexist in his assumptions about Wang’s popularity and need for his legitimation.
Must hurt to both be this wrong and get sacked over it.
What a self-important little man.
Interesting pro bono. It looks like it was before the email tantrum and none of the pages I saw mentioned it. Makes it look even more egregious.
A few more thoughts, with pro bono’s link, it certainly pushes it over to sexism, had it only been the reposted message by Wang, I might have hesitated, but reading his wikipedia page, he seems like a real jerk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lebrecht
(don’t know why my wikipedia always has each reference on a different line)
Mentioned in the wikipedia page, but worth a read on its own is Hurwitz’s piece about him.
https://www.classicstoday.com/journalist-norman-lebrecht-dead-at-61/
Ouch!
There are people who can’t do an art but set themselves up as keepers of standards about that art, standards they present as Truth, rather than their own perspective. The same thing happens with visual art. The gatekeeper gets legitimacy by upholding convention and, thereby, the establishment (or those who consider themselves to be the establishment and have the power to act that way). The establishment that the gatekeeper represents probably has expectations for women which are in the standard. There may be more of a tolerance of men who deviate from the standard than women.
Interestingly, in terms of visual art, the convention is to be seen as unconventional, and the establishment loves the “outsider” that has been taken in as an insider.
I know I am over-simplifying. I think the dynamic I described exists but there are other dynamics as well. One is all the fans who ignore the gatekeepers and love the artists of their choice anyway. Another is commerce and marketing which can shower vast rewards on someone who is hated by the gatekeepers.
And, of course, there is such a thing as good and bad in any art. I just don’t think clothing choices count as part of the evaluation.
Perhaps more than you care to know about Norman Lebrecht.
“Ultimately, Norman Lebrecht’s reputation reflects the divided nature of classical music commentary today: a once-dominant voice whose sharp style secured attention and influence but whose methods have increasingly drawn scrutiny, culminating in the loss of his long-standing BBC platform. The evidence from peer reviews, legal records, artist statements, and public reactions points to a figure who remains widely discussed—yet more often as a cautionary example of boundary-pushing journalism than as an unchallenged authority.”
Norman Lebrecht: Polarizing Classical Music Figure
I don’t like Lebrecht’s personality and business model – it seems like he fashions himself as the Hedda Hopper of the classical music world. However, I really liked his Mahler biography, he is certainly knowledgeable and hard-working and can be sensitive writer about music:
https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/classical-music-review-mahler-is-the-new-beethoven-critic-norman-lebrecht-argues-in-his-new-book-%E2%80%9Cwhy-mahler%E2%80%9D/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/04/mahler-lebrecht-memoir-beethoven-ninth
It’s perfectly possible to be knowledgeable, hardworking and sensitive about music, while also being such an unreflecting product of the patriarchy that it never occurs to you that you are not entitled to comment on a talented young female musician’s lack of “gravitas” and “modest” clothing. Pro Bono’s link absolutely shows why she had had enough.
Indeed
This piece from High Country News nails a lot of the gender dynamics floating beneath the surface in the Lebrecht/Wang exchanges:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-3/a-champion-iditarod-musher-proved-that-caring-and-trust-win-races/
Not that Wang and Ididtarod champion Susan Butcher have similar ethoi – far from it – but rather that both get met with the same sort of dismissive criticism because they excel in ways that defy the expectations of how a woman of extraordinary skill and accomplishment should act within a conservative, patriarchal field of human endeavor.
That’s an interesting piece, nous, and I was glad to learn about Butcher. She sounds great. But I am slightly uneasy about any suggestion (which to be clear you weren’t making, but which seems to be behind the last sentence you quote) that the strength and excellence of women should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy, which after all are qualities that are considered traditionally “feminine”. Now clearly, these qualities were considered by men to be antithetical to the world of the Iditarod until eventually the results spoke for themselves. But if the main point you are making is that men should/can no longer see themselves as the gatekeepers of “the rules” in traditional pursuits, then you get no argument from me.
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an ‘out’ for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I’m dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don’t know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don’t think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
lj, I’d be delighted (and the world would be a better place) if everyone demonstrated care and empathy, and I’m definitely not talking about “giving women an out”. But when I used the word “necessarily”, I was talking about the implication that these characteristics are a prerequisite for strength and excellence in women whereas, although in my opinion they are important and hugely desirable in human beings, it is possible for a woman to be a strong, excellent performer of whatever sport, art form etc without those qualities being the obvious basis or baseline for the talent. “Caring” and “empathy” are so stereotypically part of what constitutes femininity in the world in which we live, that I think it important to retain the idea that women, like men, can be exceptionally good at something without a particularly high credit balance of those qualities.
GftNC – I don’t think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher’s accomplishments by saying that she was being too “soft,” where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama’s boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.
And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It’s why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.
But in Butcher’s case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.
I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of “negging” she was illustrating in that book… “Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man.”
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, ‘necessarily’ is the one that I’m chewing on a bit. I’ve restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I’m having is to reacquire the requisite ‘softness’ that I need. While I don’t want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I’d argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I’m sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
Something that anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Aikido would know is nonsense.
That’s of a piece with their seeing everything as transactional. If you treat every interaction as unrelated to every other, then you have no allies. Merely temporary and expedient cases of aligned goals. If you have no allies, then soft power is meaningless, whether it is an oxymoron or not.
You know, I really don’t think there’s that much disagreement here on this. It was clear from the piece that Butcher’s repeated results were largely to do with her empathy and care for her dogs, and as a result it’s great to see that her example has changed norms in that sport.
All I was trying to say was that it would be reductive to imply (which nous did not) that any female excellence in sport, or artistic pursuits, was because of the fact that women intrinsically have more care and empathy than men. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. We’ll never know unless and until on a large scale boys and girls are brought up the same, with the same expectations, from birth.
Meanwhile, on the question of soft=weak, I imagine that most of us find the behaviour of the Trump administration as pathetic as I do. Leaving aside their anti-DEI initiatives, which have a complicated twining of ideological motivations in addition to this equation, I can’t be alone here in finding their absurd cosplay military posturing (Department of War, our “warriors” etc) the perfect illustration of arrested adolescent males desperately grasping for proof of their machismo quotient.
It takes me back to my college days. The instant reaction back then would have been “frat boys.” (Which might, even then, have been unfair to many fraternity members, but the stereotype had a really solid basis.) The behaviors differ only in the scope now available them. These are just the guys who never grew up.